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I’m a consumer advocate. To advocate for them – to give them voice in the business decision-making process – I must know the best ways to learn from them.

As new techniques are developed, I can embrace them, refine them, reject them, or even create something else that will work better for my clients. I want a large arsenal of effective tools. And, when needed, I want to be able to combine approaches to address the client’s objectives in the best way possible.

The current trends in marketing research highlight four rather distinct quadrants in which work is conducted. A simplified overview is shown below.

Historically, most marketing research has fallen into what I’m calling the Sociologic quadrant – participants know they’re in a test environment and they often interact with an interviewer/moderator + other participants; additionally, verbal skills often have a prominent role.

Physiologic testing has been around for years. It measures a physical response to test stimulus, such as eye tracking when conducting a copy test or website evaluation.

Ethnographic (or observational) research, with its roots in anthropology, has become quite popular in recent years. In its purist form, participants don’t know they’re being observed and less emphasis is placed on verbal responses.

Discourse Analysis is the newest approach, and is currently the hottest topic in marketing circles. These methods analyze social media, such as postings on Facebook, Twitter and personal blogs, by studying the language used.

In the coming weeks, I’ll take a closer look at each quadrant in more detail. In the meantime, I’d enjoy hearing your initial thoughts about this concept and how it might be used to help clients understand why different methods are being recommended.

Last month, Brian Powell blogged in Ad Age about cause marketing. This isn’t a field I’m familiar with, but we’ve all heard the news that charitable giving is down due to the recession and I thought there might be some interesting innovations coming from this discipline.

Brian’s main point was that “cause marketing should be ideas with business and social impact.” He believes this discipline is so important it will eventually be fully integrated into a company’s overall marketing efforts.

Just a couple of days ago, I looked into the SocialVibe widget that’s available on many of the social networking sites, such as Facebook. It’s simple: pick a charity from their list, pick a sponsor (aka advertiser), place the “badge” on your social network or blog site, and earn charitable donation points. In other words, if I can drive traffic to one of my sites, and people click on my badge, my charity gets a donation. The catch? Every visitor who clicks the badge sees a short ad or request by the sponsor (e.g., rate an ad, pick a baseball card, etc.).

Interactive cause marketing? A radical new twist on the old customer brand loyalty programs? Whatever it’s called, I like it. People can “do good” with the assistance of brands, while brands get attentive watchers of their messages. In this day of people skipping commercials due to DVR recordings and with print publication readership down, this is really quite inventive.

I just finished listening to a webcast entitled “From Brainstorm to Firestorm: Creating an Environment for Viral Marketing Success” hosted by SmartBrief and moderated by one of my favorites, Guy Kawasaki.

In Guy’s opening take, he stated the obvious: you get more followers with any social media tool by being more interesting; and you’re more interesting by providing interesting links and information. The three tools he uses are Objective Marketer (for email campaigns), TwitterFeed, and TwitterHawk. Another tool, TweetMeme, he felt to be the single most powerful way to get followers.

Andy Sernovitz had a slightly different perspective. He felt that allowing people to participate and share however was best for them was the key. Rather than TweetMeme, he would go the ShareThis approach where people could “share the love” for you/your brand in whichever they wanted.

Stacey Kane of California Tortilla (voted best burrito in D.C.) said they leveraged their TacoTalk email newsletter into effective Twitter campaigns to drive store traffic. One example: providing a “secret password” on Twitter for a free taco in-unit; conversion rates were much higher than when the same thing was done via newsletter.

Brendan Hart with National Geographic talked about the importance of connecting with the brand. For instance, on Twitter, they’ve invited people to solve a puzzle of Mount Everest at their website; as someone improves upon the time, NatGeo posts that result on Twitter, keeping it fun and interactive. On their website, people can post photos they’ve taken and a couple are selected for inclusion in each issue of the print magazine. Involvement on all fronts.

Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath summarized things this way: Use Twitter when brevity over clarity is desirable, email when content is king, and Facebook when a brand wants to be more engaging. She gave an example of Oreo, which has 1.3 million fans on Facebook and where nothing has been posted since early March vs. Coca Cola, with 3.4 million fans, who seem to be so engaged that every few minutes one of its fans is posting something. Do people love Coke more than Oreo? I’m not sure. But what’s clear is that Facebook is more important to Coke and its fans know that. In short, she said whatever social media we use, we must commit the time and resources.

As with any form of marketing, no matter the way in which we connect with our consumers, we must be channel appropriate and engaging.

For a week now, many of us have been keeping up on what we now know will be the closing chapter of the Michael Jackson saga. Like millions, I’ve kept up on the news. One might argue that this really isn’t “news” (battles in Afghanistan, anyone?), but no one can argue about whether this is a “story.”

As humans, we’re programmed to listen to and tell stories. Books, movies, and television (especially soap operas) all tell stories in one way or another. Facebook and Twitter might very well be tied to the desire to tell our own stories. The more easily we can relate to a story, the more likely we are to follow it or to become involved with it.

In marketing, we know that a sale can’t take place unless there is some connection between a consumer and the brand. Consumers are connected to “Brand Michael” and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his record sales are way up. Brands typically don’t have a story they tell to consumers, but they can (e.g., the launch of Saturn). Companies do have stories to tell (their history) and those stories often are the foundation for corporate culture – the way employees know how to act within the story.

In marketing research and account planning, storytelling is a critical skill. It’s the stories we tell (aka research analysis and consumer insights) about target audiences which inform new product development, operations, and advertising, to name just a few. Our job as consumer advocates requires we tell their story, objectively and with passion, so they have a voice when decisions are being made.

More in a future post on what makes for great marketing research/account planning storytelling.

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